Short-lived governments are routine in some democracies, with uncertainty the norm and predictability ever elusive. Yet never in London, where hundreds of years of steady parliamentary rule set a standard for the world going back to the first prime minister, Robert Walpole, three centuries ago. His two decades were a picture of stability.
Not now, as His Majesty’s government is in chaos, with Prime Minister Liz Truss out after a mere six-week stay at 10 Downing St., besting even the brevity of the forgotten premiership of George Canning, who died after only four months when John Quincy Adams was president. Did Truss even have time to measure the drapes?
The prime minister fell on her face wrestling with a beast of an economic problem — proposing huge tax cuts and deregulation, which so rattled financial markets that the Bank of England had to move to support government-issued debt. Truss did a 180, but it was too late. She had lost the confidence of Britons and, more critically for her, the confidence of the other 356 Conservative members of Parliament.
“I am sorry and I have made mistakes,” she told the Commons Wednesday, adding, “I’m a fighter and not a quitter.” She quit Thursday. Thatcher was the Iron Lady, Truss is the Aluminum Foil.
The colleagues who did her in will pick her replacement next week, rendering the Truss government a footnote notable mainly because its creation was the last public act of Queen Elizabeth II. Prepare for pub quiz questions a decade from now about the two Elizabeths, the longest-serving monarch and the shortest-serving PM.
President William Henry Harrison still holds the title as the briefest in our history for his scant 31 days in the White House, but happily for Truss, she’s only dead politically, and only for now.
Maybe now the Conservative MPs should find someone in their ranks with the cunning and staying power of Tory PM Francis Urquhart from the wonderful “House of Cards” (the British original; we’re avoiding Kevin Spacey references today). Just without the murders.
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